Consortium for the History and Philosophy of Biology

The Consortium for the History and Philosophy of Biology is a collaborative research group founded in 2006. The Consortium’s objective is to advance the investigation into the most current issues in the history and philosophy of biology. In particular, the emphasis is on integrating the philosophy of biology and its history.

Each spring, one of the institutions hosts a research workshop. Each workshop is structured around a theme of current interest, and features contributions from biologists, historians, and philosophers of science. Emphasis is placed upon graduate student contributions.

The Network for Sensory Research

Photo: Seth Doyle.

The Network for Sensory Research is an international philosophy-led group of institutions conducting interdisciplinary research on perception. Our aim is to build a theoretical model of the senses that matches the complexity of sensory phenomena, as revealed by recent scientific work.

We are particularly interested in multimodal integration and the challenges it poses to traditional models of sensory knowledge. Our goal is to establish new theoretical frameworks for understanding how the brain and the organism process and integrate information from the different senses, and how this results in phenomenally rich experience, thought, and perceptually-guided action.

The network links five major interdisciplinary research centres in philosophy of perception:

The Principal Investigator of the Network is Mohan Matthen, Canada Research Chair in the Philosophy of Perception at the University of Toronto. The co-investigators are Alex Byrne (MIT), Fiona Macpherson (Glasgow), Susanna Siegel (Harvard), and Barry Smith (London).